Page 100 of Hard to Score

“I love him, Dad.”

“I know.”

“How?”

“He’s important enough to make you lose track of time, that’s how I know.”

It’s my turn to smile. It’s my turn to realize how wrong I was keeping this from my dad. “What now though? This thing will always be between us somehow.”

“You’ll figure it out.”

“That doesn’t help.” I laugh.

“If love were easy everyone would be in it. But it isn’t and everyone’s not.”

“That didn’t help either.”

His smile deepens as he rises from his seat, walks over to where I stand, and presses a kiss to my temple. “If Drew’s anything like the kid I once knew—intelligent, contemplative, curious—he’ll figure it out.”

“But what if he doesn’t pick me?” My voice breaks and his expression falls at the sound of it.

“You never want someone to have to pick between you and their family. It would never work. There would always be resentment and bitterness that lingers.” He pulls me in for one of those bear hugs that makes you feel like a little girl again and that he has all the answers. “He has to choose you. To want to be with you. To know things will get sticky sometimes but that is how life is.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“You and Drew have had a connection since you were kids. You finished each other’s sentences, you annoyed each other, you stared at each other when the other wasn’t looking, hoping to be noticed. Stay the course. Have patience when you feel like there’s nothing left to hold on to, honey.”

He knocks on the doorjamb with his knuckles, almost as if he’s completing the one he never got to land when Drew opened the door. I’m not sure why that strikes me, but it does.

He could have come here in anger, scowling and in no way kind to Drew when he first saw him. He could have scolded me for making him worry.

But he didn’t.

Rather, he evaluated the situation in the present instead of harboring anger from the past. He treated Drew with respect, praised his game even, when I’m sure every part of the protective father he is wanted to ask questions and demand answers.

He treated me like a daughter in love, not like a best friend who had been scorned.

And now, finally, all that guilt for keeping this from my family has eased. It’s like a weight has lifted off my shoulders.

You and Drew have had a connection since you were kids.

He’s right. We did. I see it and realize it now. With that being said, will we get past this challenge?

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

DREW

FILM REVIEW HAS BEEN POSTPONED for some reason and thank fuck for that, because I was going to be late anyway.

There’s no way I could sit there and concentrate after what just happened.

Instead, I’m sitting in my truck across the street from my parents’ house trying to figure out what in the hell I’m doing here.

I just came face to face with a man I’ve believed to be the monster who undid the Bowman family. The villain in our story. Kenyon Kincade.

And yet, he was nothing like the man I’d led myself to believe and like everything I’d seemed to have forgotten. The kind man who loved his girls more than his next breath, and with a laugh that you couldn’t help but join in with.

Seeing him . . . Christ, seeing him has brought about a tidal wave of memories and the emotions that came with them. More so than when I saw Brexton for the first time, because Kenyon was . . . Kenyon was the stable one. The adult of the four parents who everyone listened to and went to for advice.